REPORTERS AND "ARITHMOPHOBIA"

 “If you can do that calculation, I’ll give you a job here.” City of Waterloo treasurer responding to questions about the repayment formula at the heart of the RIM Park financing scandal.

By Kevin Crowley, The Record of Waterloo Region

Yes, I did the calculation. No, I didn’t take the job.

I did, however, learn a valuable lesson about numbers: Even accountants get them wrong. And that’s empowering, especially for math-shy reporters.

It can also be rewarding. People who know their numbers often use them to intimidate the rest of us. If  you insist that bureaucrats and business people explain their numbers, you might just bag a major story.

But first things first.

The fear of numbers (it even has a name -- arithmophobia) seems to be a common problem for journalists. Like deer in headlights, most of us freeze at the sight of percentages, budgets and financial reports.

But like any phobia, the fear of numbers can be tamed if not eliminated. In fact, a little fear is probably a good thing, especially if it drives us to triple check every figure we use in a story.

Just about all reporters encounter numbers at one time or another, whether you’re an arts reporter covering the symphony’s funding woes or a cop reporter trying to make sense of a police budget.

My best advise is to confront the number beast head on. That means figuring out what it is about numbers that scares you, and then mastering it.

Baffled by percentages? Read up on how to calculate them. Or, better yet, ask someone who knows his stuff to explain exactly how to do it.

 Unsure about the difference between “operating profit” and “net income”? Look it up in a basic text or on the Internet. Or, again, simply ask an expert, like a local accountant or business professor.

Nothing beats confidence for overcoming fear. But if you’re still trembling at the thought of a row of numbers, go back to Journalism 101: There’s no such thing as a dumb question.

I’ve come a long way in my battle against arithmophobia, but I still ask interviewees to explain their numbers to me -- sloooowwwly.

When I first began looking into the RIM Park financing deal, I couldn’t make sense of the complex repayment calculation at the heart of the city’s financing contract. I performed the calculation myself and came up with a total repayment that was twice as big as the number being tossed around by the city treasurer.

So I asked him to explain the calculation. He couldn’t. In fact, he said he relied on the financing company to explain it to him. “If you can do that calculation, I’ll give you a job here,” he joked.

I was shocked. But, being less than confident about my own math skills, my first thought was that I must be missing something that was obvious to the accounting pros at the finance company.

Because I lacked confidence, I shied away from the repayment calculation in my first package of stories, choosing instead to focus on other questionable aspects of the deal.

I later took one of those aspects -- the interest rate -- to a couple of math experts: The Record’s own chartered accountant and an accounting professor at the University of Waterloo. Using spreadsheet software, they quickly found that the city had indeed understated the real interest rate. Bingo -- I had a major story.

A colleague of mine, who took over the story while I was on vacation, then asked the UW professor and a finance professor from the University of Western Ontario to try the repayment calculation itself. Using their spreadsheet programs, they confirmed -- independent of one another -- that my original interpretation of the formula was correct. Ka-pow -- another big story!

The lesson in all this?

Yes, numbers are intimidating, but they’re also essential to good journalism, so you can’t afford to hide from them.

My advice is to tackle numbers head on, find out what you don’t know, and always insist that bureaucrats and business people explain their math.

Remember, it’s better to ask a dumb question than to miss a big story.

(Kevin Crowley is a business reporter at The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo. For his investigative work on this story, he was named Western Ontario’s Journalist of the Year and won a National Newspaper Award citation. He and the paper also won the Governor-General’s Award for meritorious journalism.)